Davis and Pakistan’s sovereignty

The controversy over ‘CIA spy’ Raymond Davis, who shot dead two Pakistanis at a busy Lahore bus stop, is straining relations between Pakistan and the United States. US President Barack Obama and his team are using both threats and persuasion to get their man back who, they claim, is a member of their diplomatic mission and hence immune from criminal prosecution under the Vienna Conventions. Officially, Pakistan’s government is reluctant to endorse this claim, but its dilemma is palpable: It can neither annoy the US nor can it afford to exasperate the already frayed public tempers at home.

The opposition, in particular the party of the Sharif brothers, blames the government for messing things up. And the right-wing parties say it is a matter of our national prestige and sovereignty. Surprisingly, some liberal politicians, too, condone their rants. But what makes it a matter of our sovereignty — the killing of two Pakistanis in Lahore or Davis’s ‘CIA links’?

If it’s Davis’s CIA links, the Lahore incident has only lifted the curtain off the web of the American spy network in Pakistan. Our former military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, had cut a secret deal with the US, allowing the CIA to ‘conduct surveillance on the Taliban and al Qaeda’. If it’s the killing of two Pakistanis by a ‘CIA agent’, it isn’t new. The CIA has killed hundreds of Pakhtun tribesmen in the northwestern parts of the country.

Even if it’s both, it has happened umpteenth times in our tribal regions where the CIA virtually has the licence to kill whomever it assumes is a Taliban or al Qaeda operative. Since 2004, CIA-operated drones have struck ‘targets’ in tribal regions and, in some cases, in parts of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, close to 200 times, killing 2,000-plus people, mostly innocent civilians.

Our government’s policy is ambiguous: Openly it condemns these attacks and secretly it condones them as part of a ‘tacit understanding’ with the US. The irony is that the Americans are ‘free’ to infringe on our sovereignty in the tribal areas but not beyond. Why? Does this mean the tribal agencies are not part of ‘sovereign’ Pakistan or the tribesmen living there are ‘lesser’ Pakistanis? Ostensibly, the secular opposition, too, is reluctant to argue out this issue, while politico-religious parties have, perhaps, realised the futility of their protests.

So why so much fuss about Davis? If our government and its intelligence agencies were really unaware of the presence of the CIA and its private contractors, such as Blackwater (now Xe Worldwide) and Dyncorp, it’s a huge security failure. And if our politicians really care about sovereignty, they should get the drone attacks stopped.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2011.